Why I'm Not Hannah

There I was, hunched over yards of cheap purple velvet, working my fingers to the bone to ensure my son would be the envy of all the other three-year-olds in town.

Why, I'm just like Hannah, I thought, awash in the sacrificial glow of stay-at-home-motherhood. You know, Hannah? From the Bible? Sewing the coat for her little boy? Yeah, don't feel too bad. Turns out I'd been fed the watered-down, namby-pamby, pre-salvation-push Sunday school version of Hannah's story by an ex-boyfriend who clearly knew me well enough to realize I'd have a hissy when I found out the real deal.

Having visited this site: http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/hannah.htm , I realized how very not like Hannah I was. See below.

I'm not infertile, having accomplished the J-Man three years ago. We're working on number two right now.

I'm not Jewish. I'm a gnostic Christian with pagan and Buddhist tendencies, which is really fun considering that I…

…don't live in Ephraim. Instead, I live smack dab in the middle of Georgia, right under the buckle of the Bible Belt. (I should also point out here that my God would never have expected me to make or keep a promise like Hannah did. And even if I have eighteen children after the J-Man, not a single one of them will EVER be able to take the place of my first born son.) I mean, honestly. Poor frickin' Hannah...

My husband is not, to my knowledge, a bigamist. He does have an unhealthy relationship with beer sausages that occasionally drives me to tears, but we're working through it.

It turns out Hannah wasn't sewing winter coats like my ex-boyfriend told me. What the site above leaves out is that Hannah was sewing the robes in which her son would perform religious duties at the temple. Ya'll, I was sewing a pirate costume. The J-Man might have looked a little like Prince, but I am quite certain he wouldn't have been mistaken for a priest or even an acolyte. The tricorn hat would have been a dead giveaway.

See? Told you I wasn't Hannah. What I am is a SAHM trying to raise a good man, maintain a healthy marriage, keep a clean house, sustain the level of hipness I have managed to scrape up thus far in my life, write a publishable novel or short story, preserve the connections with family and friends I've forged even though I live hours away from most of them, and find the perfect dressing recipe for Christmas dinner.

Hmm...Pardon me while I go sacrifice a young bull.